Of Snowstorms and Bushy Trees

Many workloads for analytical processing in commercial RDBMSs are dominated by snowstorm queries, which are characterized by references to multiple large fact tables and their associated smaller dimension tables. This paper describes a technique for bushy join tree optimization for snowstorm queries in Oracle database system. This technique generates bushy join trees containing subtrees that produce substantially reduced sets of rows and, therefore, their joins with other subtrees are generally much more efficient than joins in the left-deep trees. The generation of bushy join trees within an existing commercial physical optimizer requires extensive changes to the optimizer. Further, the optimizer will have to consider a large join permutation search space to generate efficient bushy join trees. The novelty of the approach is that bushy join trees can be generated outside the physical optimizer using logical query transformation that explores a considerably pruned search space. The paper describes an algorithm for generating optimal bushy join trees for snowstorm queries using an existing query transformation framework. It also presents performance results for this optimization, which show significant execution time improvements.